The other regime change

Did the Bush administration allow a network of right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup in Haiti?

By Max Blumenthal

Jul 16, 2004 | On Feb. 8, 2001, the federally funded International Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer for Haiti, Stanley Lucas, appeared on the Haitian station Radio Tropicale to suggest three strategies for vanquishing Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. First, Lucas proposed forcing Aristide to accept early elections and be voted out; second, he could be charged with corruption and arrested; and finally, Lucas raised dealing with Aristide the way the Congolese people had dealt with President Laurent Kabila the month before. "You did see what happened to Kabila?" Lucas asked his audience.

Kabila had been assassinated.

IRI's communications director, Thayer Scott, in an interview with Salon, characterized Lucas' radio remarks as "a comparative analysis of countries that embrace democracy and those that do not."

Whatever the case, Lucas and IRI, a nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration, did more than talk. Throughout the last six years, IRI, whose stated mission is to "promote the practice of democracy" abroad, conducted a $3 million party-building program in Haiti, training Aristide's political opponents, uniting them into a single bloc and, according to a former U.S. ambassador there, encouraging them to reject internationally sanctioned power-sharing agreements in order to heighten Haiti's political crisis. Moreover, Lucas' controversial personal background and his ties to Haitian opposition figures with violent histories -- including some who participated in a coup against Aristide in February -- raise questions about whether IRI's Haiti program violated its own guidelines and those of its funders.

The recent political turmoil in Haiti and in Venezuela (where the Bush White House tacitly supported a coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002, and where IRI also has a murky history of involvement) reflect a troubling pattern in the Bush administration's prevailing approach to the export of "democracy." When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, he adopted a policy of studied neglect toward Haiti, scaling back President Clinton's policy of direct engagement while appointing veteran anti-Aristide ideologues to key State Department positions. Meanwhile, the well-connected, smooth-talking Lucas acted as the Haitian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who helped neoconservatives in Washington promote the war against Saddam Hussein. Like Chalabi, Lucas ingratiated himself with powerful Republicans sympathetic to the concept of regime change in his native country and lobbied for increased funding to the opposition groups he advised and helped train.

Impeccably dressed and charming, as a young man Lucas gained renown as a Caribbean judo champion and well-connected socialite. He is the scion of a pro-Duvalier Haitian landowning family from the town of Jean Rebel. According to Amnesty International and a longtime Jean Rebel resident now in the U.S. who spoke on condition of anonymity, in 1987 Lucas' cousins Leonard and Remy organized a machete-wielding mob to hack to death 250 peasants protesting for land redistribution outside their ranch. IRI's Scott dismisses the massacre as an "urban legend."

At the time of the massacre, Lucas was active in plans to crush Haiti's nascent democracy movement. According to Kim Ives, who has known Lucas since 1986 and is editor of the independent Haitian weekly Haiti Progres, during a chance encounter in 1988 in Port-au-Prince, Lucas told him he was training Haitian soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics. "I'd always pictured him as more of a playboy than anything," Ives recounted. "That was the first time I realized he was a serious player involved with the soldiers preparing to put down the popular uprisings to come."

According to Bob Maguire, a leading Haiti expert at Trinity College and former State Department official, Lucas' personal history raises serious questions about IRI's integrity. "Having this guy as your point person for Haiti, with this kind of background, is just incredibly provocative," says Maguire. "If your organization wants to have a useful, balanced program, how could you have this guy as your program officer?"

The role of figures like Lucas in the coup suggests a complex web of Republican connections to Aristide's ouster that may never be known. What is clear, though, is that the destabilization of Aristide's government was initiated early on by IRI, a group of right-wing congressmen and their staffers by imposing draconian sanctions, training Aristide's opponents and encouraging them in their intransigence. The Bush administration appears to have gone along, delegating Haiti policy to right-wing underlings like the assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, a former staffer to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Not only did Noriega collaborate with IRI to increase funding to Aristide's opponents, but as a mediator to Haiti's political crisis he appears to have routinely acquiesced with the opposition's divisive tactics.

In February 2004, as insurgents went on the offensive and Haiti began descending into chaos, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the Bush administration's view of the situation at a Feb. 10 press briefing: "Everyone's hopeful that the situation, which tends to ebb and flow down there, will stay below a certain threshold ... we have no plans to do anything." Two weeks later, an international delegation was unable to broker a compromise; Aristide agreed to a power-sharing peace deal, but the rebels declined. With the insurgency sweeping toward the capital on Feb. 28, top Bush officials convened, but rather than send in troops to protect Aristide's government, they reversed their official position of support, asking Aristide to leave the country immediately under U.S. stewardship. Haiti's elected leader left on a plane the following day in the company of U.S. diplomats, bound for exile in the Central African Republic.

To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader -- but since his ouster, the situation in Haiti appears to have deteriorated to a point lower than at any moment during his tenure. The looting that followed Aristide's departure has cost Haitian businesses hundreds of millions of dollars; most of the Haitian national police force's weapons and equipment were stolen and over half of its officers quit; and the price of rice, essential to the diet of Haiti's poor, has more than doubled in the last four months. Moreover, recent reports describe rampant human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings filling the power void.

For the majority of Haitians who live on one meal and less than a dollar a day, regime change has only brought more violence, chaos and starvation.

Next Page: Right-wing Republicans used IRI as a Trojan horse inside Haiti

• View blog reactions